It's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to

Photo by Liza Pooor on Unsplash

Another year, another BIRTHDAY.  No presents, please.

A big birthday is it? My friends, there comes a time when all birthdays are big. And this one’s big enough to be asking people to guess my age - but not so big that they’ll fall over in astonishment - 'How old? Never!’ - when I tell them.

Shaming, I know. That it should come to this.  Hoping someone will think I’m a weekend younger than I actually am.

People have been asking what celebrations I’m planning.  I tell them none, but they’re welcome to come streetwalking with me as long as they don’t speak. Just allow me to shake my head, sigh deeply and not look where I’m going. Birthdays are not for flâneurs. You can’t saunter lazily through the city observing its rich variety if all you can think about are the years you have left to you. You’re better off sitting on a memorial bench in a park with your face buried in your hands. I’ve told friends they can join me on a bench if they fancy it. So far there have been no takers.

As for other plans, don’t they know the only thing that makes God laugh more than a plan is a plan made by a person my age.  God?  I’m talking about God now!  The word is out that I have a distant look in my eyes, like one contemplating eternity.  But there’s nothing new in that.  A birthday has always seemed like a goodbye to life to me. 

Pity my poor parents. ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ I used to say when they brought in my birthday cake.

How old would I have been then? Ten, twelve?

‘I’m not sure all this reading is good for him,’ my father would say to my mother. I never stayed to hear her response; I was back in my bedroom, blinded by tears, listening to Mario Lanza singing E Lucevan le stelle.

L’ora e fuggita

e muoio disperato.

My father wan’t sure all that music was good for me either. He was right to be concerned. Between them, music and literature confirmed either my sense of impending loss or the demeaning sameness of time.  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.  What an incorrigible optimist Macbeth was, imagining that if only he hadn’t listened to the witches, he’d have had honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, to look forward to.  In your dreams, King: you’d still have been counting the petty pace of life creeping to the last syllable of recorded time.

But I must stop this self-pity.  So far, at least, the realisation of ageing is turning out to be less agonising than the anticipation. I would even go so far as to say I am enjoying life despite another upcoming birthday - I repeat: no presents - and would be feeling up for every fresh challenge were it not that so many people I know and have come to rely on have themselves decided to retire, go to live in the country, sell their books, buy a dog, stop taking phone calls, leave messages on their emails saying ‘I am not at my desk today and have no intention of returning,’ and otherwise abandon me.

Last year, my cardiologist - the kindest, most calming of men with the air of a friendly otter - waved a gentle online goodbye to his patients.  I am devastated.  I can’t say he saved my life, but I always felt he would when required to.  Once, after I returned to him a machine that had monitored the fluctuation of my heart beats for two whole days and nights, he told me I was a scientific marvel.  Without treatment and against all probability, I’d gone back to almost normal.  ‘That’s entirely down to you,’ I told him.  ‘You are the treatment.   You looked so benignly upon me I couldn’t allow my heart to let you down.  You smiled me into better health.’  I didn’t mention this to my health insurance in case they refused to pay out for compassion.  But what’s going to happen now he’s gone?  Already I’m fibrillating again. 

I fear the doctor who rolls me over on his couch to investigate my prostate will be the next to go.  He’s been threatening it for years but now I feel its imminence with every probe.  I suspect his heart’s no longer in it - and I can’t tell him I know a good cardiologist.  Some things I don’t mind changing doctors for.  Ear pain.  Cysts.  Fatigue.  But a prostate creates a network of loyalties.  There is also propriety to consider.  I prefer those who take intimate care of me to be my vintage and therefore understanding of the ravages of senescence.  I can’t be expected to roll over on the couch for some neophyte with tattooed fingers who’ll report his detailed findings accompanied by a chortly face on Instagram.

(Yes, yes, yes - I know a blood test has replaced the finger method, but it’s my birthday and I’ll reminisce if I want to. )

The list of defections goes on. My dentist gave up his practice not so long ago.  Ditto my eye man.  How long before every medical practitioner over thirty sells up?

I might ask the same question of editors who undertake functions for writers no less personal than those performed by urologists.  My publisher and editor of twenty years, who oversaw ten of my novels, signed off last year to live by the sea.  There on the beach his dog chases the same ball my retired otolaryngologist’s dog chases.  Do they build sandcastles with moats and discuss me?  Do they wonder if I’ll ever make another birthday?  Do they know I made the last?  Do they care?

My publisher saw me though some hard times.  Together, we failed to win countless prizes, and even failed to make it onto countless short-lists.  He’d ring me up with the news.  Always at about 11.45 am, after the judges had met to reaffirm their gross misjudgement for the final time.   His voice seemed to come from far away, where the world was ending.  ‘Howard’ - he pronounced my name with a queer, booming lachrymosity, as though he’d just seen the x-rays of my bowels which my oncologist was selling on the black-market, ‘Howard, bad news I’m afraid.’  I pretended not to know what he was talking about.  Bad news pertaining to what?  Prize?  There’s a prize?

We’d meet for a consolatory lunch in a crushed publishers’ eatery in Soho.  In my experience, medical men like to cut into great hunks of red meat in spacious, luminously chandeliered restaurants in Mayfair where there’s a good chance they’ll pick up a new patient, whereas publishers - who don’t want any more writers - take the ones they have for a bowl of Puy lentils in broom cupboards and talk in low voices so that the other publishers and writers can’t hear what they’re saying - an entirely unnecessary precaution since they’re all saying the same thing, cursing the same judges and wondering why no one reads literary fiction any more.  The answer, as I’ve been saying since my last significant birthday, is that they call it literary fiction.  Fiction’s fiction. If it doesn’t belong to literature it shouldn’t be published. But no one listens.

And now my trainer’s repeating last year’s threats to move up country.  I say trainer but I am past training.  He’s more my stretcher.  My wife’s stretcher, actually, but she doesn’t want to be stretched while I shrink.  I refused to have him at first.  I had hated exercise at school when it was free, so there was no sense in paying someone to make me as unhappy as I’d been then.  I didn’t want to live in my body.  Anywhere else, just not my body.  But I capitulated.   It was either that or watch my wife be stretched to twice my length. So down on to the blue foam judo mat I drop, pushing my thumbs out towards my shelves - American novels to the left, Jane Austen and George Eliot to the right - pressing my head into the floor, flattening my palms, elongating my legs.  And then the bug.  And then the dying swan.  And then the cat and the cow.  And then making like I have a tail and wagging it.  A whole farmyard of dishonour.   Demeaning doesn’t get close.

But I am a willing participant in this dishonour now.  I even own a pair of Nike shorts.  And I’ve grown to like my stretcher.  David.  He comes over to my corpse and shakes it.  It rattles like a bag of Belgian mussels.  It would seem I’ve been out of alignment for decades.  At least now when I walk my head looks as though it could once have belonged to me. 

 I still fall over at regular intervals - up the stairs carrying full bottles of wine; down the stairs carrying glasses emptied of wine; on the pavement, dodging other drunks.  So David gets me to practise keeping my balance by describing the figure eight balletically with my toe - a manoeuvre so elaborate it would have floored Nureyev.  I can do a zero and then another zero but can’t unite them in a single movement.  ‘I’ll have mastered this by next year,’ I say to David.  That’s when he tells me he’s finally going north.  ‘For a trip?’  ‘To live.’  ‘And what’s going to happen to me?’  David has a sense of humour.  ‘You’ll go back to being short,’ he says.

 

I keep saying “no presents,” but come to think of it there is one I won’t say no to - you becoming a paid subscriber. That will go some way to making my birthday a happy one after all.